2016-08-16

I believe that Open Source is one of the best ways to develop software. However, as I have written in blogs before, the Open Source model presents challenges to creating a software company that has the needed resources to continually invest in product development and innovation.

One reason for this is a lack of understanding of the costs associated with developing and extending software. As one example of what I regard to be unrealistic user expectations, here is a statement from a large software company when I asked them to support MariaDB development with financial support:

“As you may remember, we’re a fairly traditional and conservative company. A donation from us would require feature work in exchange for the donation. Unfortunately, I cannot think of a feature that I would want developed that we would be willing to pay for this year.”

This thinking is flawed on many fronts -- a new feature can take more than a year to develop! It also shows that the company saw that features create value they would invest in, but was not willing to pay for features that had already been developed and was not prepared to invest into keeping alive a product they depend upon. They also don't trust the development team with the ability to independently define new features that would bring value. Without that investment, a technology company cannot invest in ongoing research and development, thereby dooming its survival.

To be able to compete with closed source technology companies who have massive profit margins, one needs income.

Dual licensing on Free Software, as we applied it at MySQL, works only for a limited subset of products (something I have called ‘infrastructure software’) that customers need to combine with their own closed source software and distribute to their customers. Most software products are not like that. This is why David Axmark and I created the Business Source license (BSL), a license designed to harmonize producing Open Source software and running a successful software company.

The intent of BSL is to increase the overall freedom and innovation in the software industry, for customers, developers, user and vendors. Finally, I hope that BSL will pave the way for a new business model that sustains software development without relying primarily on support.

Today, MariaDB Corporation is excited to introduce the beta release of MariaDB MaxScale 2.0, our database proxy, which is released under BSL. I am very happy to see MariaDB MaxScale being released under BSL, rather than under an Open Core or Closed Source license. Developing software under BSL will provide more resources to enhance it for future releases, in similar ways as Dual
Licensing did for MySQL. MariaDB Corporation will over time create more BSL
products. Even with new products coming under BSL, MariaDB Server will
continue to be licensed under GPL in perpetuity. Keep in mind that
because MariaDB Server extends earlier MySQL GPL code it is forever legally
bound by the original GPL license of MySQL.

In addition to putting MaxScale under BSL, we have also created a framework to make it easy for anyone else to license their software under BSL.

Here follows the copyright notice used in the MaxScale 2.0 source code:

/** Copyright (c) 2016 MariaDB Corporation Ab** Use of this software is governed by the Business Source License* included in the LICENSE.TXT file and at www.mariadb.com/bsl.** Change Date: 2019-01-01** On the date above, in accordance with the Business Source* License, use of this software will be governed by version 2* or later of the General Public License.*/

Two out of three top characteristics of the BSL are already shown here: The Change Date and the Change License. Starting on 1 January 2019 (the Change Date), MaxScale 2.0 is governed by GPLv2 or later (the Change License).

Use Limitation: Usage of the software is free when your application uses the Software with a total of less than three database server instances for production purposes.

This third top characteristic is in effect until the Change Date.

What this means is that the software can be distributed, used, modified, etc., for free, within the use limitation. Beyond it, a commercial relationship is required – which, in the case of MaxScale 2.0, is a MariaDB Enterprise Subscription, which permits the use of MaxScale with three or more database servers.

Code contributions are encouraged and accepted through the "new BSD" license.

The BSL is purposefully designed to avoid vendor lock-in. With vendor lock in, I here mean that users of BSL software are not depending on one single vendor for support, fixing bugs or enhancing the BSL product.

The Change Date and Change License provide a time-delayed safety net for users, should the vendor stop developing the software.

Testing BSL software is always free of cost.

Production use of the software is free of cost within the use limitation.

Adoption of BSL software is encouraged with use limitations that provide ample freedom.

Monetisation of BSL software is driven by incremental sales in cases where the use limitation applies.

Whether BSL will be widely adopted remains to be seen. It’s certainly my desire that this new business model will inspire companies who develop Closed Source software or Open Core software to switch to BSL, which will ultimately result in more Open Source software in the community. With BSL, companies can realize a similar amount of revenue for the company, as they could with closed source or open core, while the free of cost usage in core production scenarios establishes a much larger user base to drive testing, innovation and adoption.

2016-02-11

The mariadb.org website had over one million page views in 2015, a growth of about 9% since 2014. Good growth has been visible all over the MariaDB ecosystem and we can conclude that 2015 was a successful year for MariaDB.

Increased adoption

MariaDB was included for the first time in an official Debian release (version 8.0 "Jessie") and there has been strong adoption of MariaDB 10.0 in Linux distributions that already shipped 5.5. MariaDB is now available from all major Linux distributions including SUSE, RedHat, Debian and Ubuntu.
Adoption of MariaDB in other platforms also increased, and MariaDB is now available as a database option on, among others, Amazon RDS, 1&1, Azure and Juju Charm Store (Ubuntu).

Active maintenance and active development

In 2015 there were 6 releases of the 5.5 series, 8 releases of the 10.0 series and 8 releases of the 10.1 series. The 10.1 series was announced for general availability in October 2015 with the release of 10.1.8. In addition, there were also multiple releases of MariaDB Galera Cluster, and the C, Java and OBDC connectors as well as many other MariaDB tools. The announcements for each release can be read on the Mariadb.org blog archives with further details in the Knowledge Base.
Some of the notable new features in 10.1 include:

Galera clustering is now built-in instead of a separate server version, and can be activated with a simple configuration change.

We are also proud that the release remains backwards compatible and it is easy to upgrade to 10.1 from any previous MariaDB or MySQL release.
10.1 was also a success in terms of collaboration and included major contributions from multiple companies and developers.

MariaDB events and talks

The main event organized by the MariaDB Foundation in the year was the MariaDB Developer Meetup in Amsterdam in October, at the Booking.com offices. It was a success with over 60 attendees
In addition there were about a dozen events in 2015 at which MariaDB Foundation staff spoke.

We are planning a new MariaDB developer event in early April 2016 in Berlin. We will make a proper announcement of this as soon as we have the date and place fixed.

Staff, board and members

In 2015 the staff included:

Otto Kekäläinen, CEO

Michael "Monty" Widenius, Founder and core developer

Andrea Spåre-Strachan, personal assistant to Mr Widenius

Sergey Vojtovich, core developer

Alexander Barkov, core developer

Vicențiu Ciorbaru, developer

Ian Gilfillan, documentation writer and webmaster

Our staffing will slightly increase as Vicențiu will start working full time in 2016 for the Foundation.
Our developers worked a lot on performance and scalability issues, ported the best features from new MySQL releases, improved MariaDB portability for platforms like ARM, AIX, IBM s390 and Power8, fixed security issues and other bugs. A lot of time was also invested in cleaning up the code base as the current 2,2 million lines of code includes quite a lot of legacy code in it. Version control and issue tracker statistics shows that the foundation staff made 528 commits, reported 373 bugs or issues and closed 424 bugs or other issues.
In total there were 2400 commits made by 91 contributors in 2015.

The Board of Directors in 2015 consisted of:

Chairman Rasmus Johansson, VP Engineering at MariaDB Corporation

Michael "Monty" Widenius, Founder and CTO of MariaDB Corporation

Jeremy Zawodny, Software Engineer at Craigslist

Sergei Golubchik, Chief Architect at MariaDB Corporation

Espen Håkonsen, CIO of Visma and Managing Director of Visma IT & Communications

Eric Herman, Principal Developer at Booking.com

MariaDB Foundation CEO Otto Kekäläinen served as the secretary of the board.
In 2015 we welcomed as new major sponsors Booking.com, Visma, Verkkokauppa.com. Acronis just joined to be a member for 2016. Please check out the full list of supporters.
If you want to help the MariaDB Foundation in the mission to guarantee continuity and open collaboration, please support us as with individual or corporate sponsorship.

What will 2016 bring?

We expect steady growth in the adoption of MariaDB in 2016. There are many migrations from legacy database solutions underway, and as the world becomes increasingly digital, there are a ton of new software projects starting that use MariaDB to for their SQL and no-SQL data needs. In 2016 many will upgrade to 10.1 and the quickest ones will start using MariaDB 10.2 which is scheduled to be released some time during 2016. MariaDB also has a lot of plugins and storage engines that are getting more and more attention, and we expect more buzz around them when software developers figure out new ways to manage data in fast, secure and scalable ways.